The heatwave that paralysed Europe last summer was hailed as a harbinger of global warming by many, including climatologists who predicted wilder extremes in floods, droughts and storms thanks to climate change. Results from a climate model now add evidence to the idea that extreme temperature events are set to rise - for Europe at least1.More than 20,000 people are thought to have died as a result of Europe's heatwave last year.During June and July, temperatures across much of the continenttopped 40 °C.Christoph Schär of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, and his colleagues calculate that, based on average temperatures since 1990, a European summer such as that of 2003 should come along only once every 46,000 years - even after taking global warming into account. "Statistically, this event should not have happened," Schär says.The researchers therefore reasoned that greenhouse gases such as CO2 might boost weather variability as well as the overall temperature. Using predicted greenhouse-gas levels for the end of this century, they ran a regional computer climate simulation to estimate the spread of future temperatures in Europe.The simulation showed that extreme temperatures will indeed be more common in the future. "I wouldn't bet on how much the variation will increase," says Schär, "but I'm confident that it will."
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